All fans of kitsch architecture, great dive bars, giant teapots, and Tacoma—Unite! Save the Java Jive alive!

The old Rainier Brewery on Airport Way South is contaminated with toxic exterior paints. If a solution isn’t found to remove or seal up the old paint, the whole complex might get condemned and demolished.

It’s a beautiful labyrinth of industrial spaces, now housing artist studios and the Tully’s Coffee head office. (The coffee roasting plant, located in part of the old brewery for several years, is now closed; Tully’s product is now made by Green Mountain Roasters in Sumner.)

This is a landmark. It needs to stay. Period.

The Fun Forest carny operation is being demolished in stages. Boo! But a done deal, alas.

Now, the Space Needle’s private owners (principally the Howard S. Wright family) have announced what they’d like to see in place of the Fun Forest’soutdoor rides and indoor arcade—a huge Dale Chihuly glass art exhibit, most of which would be behind paid-admission gates.

Don’t do it, Seattle Center!

Getting rid of the last amusement park within the city limits is one thing. It would be even worse to replace it with one more world class-esque monument to the Dictatorship of the Upscale.

Let’s have more visual arts in the Center. But let’s have lots more different kinds of visual arts.

Our ol’ pal Tim Egan knows where the new poverty is at—”Slumburbia.”

Urban planning blogger Josh Grigsby spent three days in Seattle recently. He totally hated it:

Seattle is predominantly low-density sprawl, and its urban core reeks of decay. Never have I felt less inclined to venture out after dark than in the International District or adjacent Pioneer Square. Heading out from the hostel on foot to find a bowl of noodles for dinner I was accosted twice by young men selling drugs, followed for several weaving blocks by five other young men, screamed at by a well-dressed but seemingly mentally ill young man, and propositioned by a strung-out pimp whose employees remained unseen. Roving gangs of teens and twentysomethings, faces hidden by oversized hoods, patrolled the streets. I saw no families, no police, no women, none of the eyes on the street that self-regulate their urban neighborhoods.

He doesn’t like our transit system either.

With the Fun Forest going away, City officials now have their sights on the other part of Seattle Center they’ve long wanted to remove, High School Memorial Stadium.

Now, the City and the School District have a tentative pact to tear down the stadium and replace it with an underground parking garage, a “great lawn” (with the Olympic Sculpture Park nearby, do we really need another of those?), and a newer but smaller stadium.

Memorial Stadium is one reason the 1962 World’s Fair turned a profit, when later fairs in other cities didn’t. The fair reused several existing buildings—an armory (Center House), a civic auditorium (McCaw Hall), an ice arena (Mercer Arena), and Memorial Stadium (built in 1947, and named to honor the local WWII dead). The fair’s opening and closing ceremonies were held there. A temporary water-filled trench was put in on the football field, and used for boat races.

The stadium, designed in Truman-era military/stoic public architecture and already 15 years old at the time of the fair, already looked decrepit by the ’70s. All the civic planning pundits (especially those without kids in the public schools, which is most of them) have wanted it outta there, replaced by something more high-culture-y.

But the school district needs a neutral-turf site for football and soccer games. And it really needs the revenue it gets from the stadium’s surface parking lot.

So far, nobody’s talking officially about what the City and the school district agreed to. The here-linked SeaTimes story speculates it might include an all-new high school where the Mercer Garage is now, just north of the Center grounds.

As one whose longtime friends include a lot of parents of school kids, I think that would be great. It’d be concrete evidence that this city does indeed care about kids. It would also encourage more families with kids within the greater central-city core.

Arcade, the Northwest architecture and design quarterly, devoted its summer issue to environmental themes.

But instead of hyping new “green” buildings and products, many of the issue’s essays (guest-edited by Charles Mudede and Jonathan Golob) propose a world with fewer buildings and products.

Granted, this year we’re not adding too much to the total world supply of them.

This is particularly the case with California professor Barry Katz’s closing piece, “The Promise of Recession.” Katz remembers how past designers such as William Morris sought to influence the world by promoting an honest, simple aesthetic. Then Katz imagines a near-future in which “every act of production and consumption stabilizes, or even adds to, our collective natural assets.”

This, he believes, means a lot fewer new products (of all kinds), hence a lot fewer people employed to design those products. But there would be work for “post-designers.” Some of these would revamp the already-built world to be more sustainable and more nature-friendly. Others would devise “an ecology of information, thinning the festering datamass and rehabilitating the printed page.”

Similar themes are posited by Golob in “Green On Wheels.” He argues that today’s gasoline-powered automobiles are just about as efficient as they can ever be, when you figure in the costs of refining and transporting the fuel. No, Golob avers, “carrying about two hundred pounds of human being in four thousand pounds of boxy steel, glass and aluminum” is an activity whose time will soon pass, by necessity, whether we like it or not.

Also in the issue:

• Three fantasy illustrations by Jed Dunkerly, depicting speculative attempts at “Engineering the Environment”—using sky-bound sprinkler systems to rain on farmland, using offshore “wind rigs” to alter air currents, and using construction cranes to plant fully-grown trees.
• Nicholas Veroli on the meaning of “catastrophe,” and whether any situation (including the present environmental crisis) can be called one before it’s past-tense.
• Erin Kendig on Krazy!, a book documenting last year’s Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit exploring the surrealistic sides of comics, animation, and related arts.
• Jim Cava reviewing Tony Fry’s book Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Cava agrees with Fry’s assertion that the constant making and selling of what Cava calls “unnecessary consumables” is bad for the planet, no matter how “green” any individual product is claimed to be. Fry and Cava insist we need to redesign our whole consumerist culture, not merely individual consumer products.

If we take Fry’s case (and those of the other Arcade contributors) seriously, the human-built environment will change. It’s not just unwise to keep going the way we’ve gone this past century, it’s impossible.

The only question is what we’ll change into.

…of a time recently passed, whose legacy will linger with us for decades to come. They’re the Cheap Shit Condos (some of which actually are, or were, quite expensive).

The historic Central District meeting hall, known in recent decades as the original home of On the Boards’ performance-art events, now belongs to Historic Seattle. A big restoration/renovation will begin shortly.

…may be on pause, but that’s not stopping landowners from greasing the legal wheels in hopes of future development projects. Just last week, the City said owners of the former Bon Marche livery stables on Western could go ahead and tear down the 101-year-old clapboard structure, should they ever choose to do so.

Besides being a relic of the horse-drawn-delivery days, and one of the last buildings its age remaining in greater downtown, it’s also one of Belltown’s last buildings containing real artist spaces. (Note: On this Web site, architectural offices are not considered to be “artist spaces.”) It was in that building that I spent much of the 1994-95 winter and spring in Art Chantry’s former graphic design studio, assembling my book Loser.

We lose our NBA team, our biggest bank, our oldest newspaper, and now the biggest and greatest remnant of Seattle’s “working waterfront” era, the Alaskan Way Viaduct. At a Tuesday signing ceremony, city and state officials finalized the deal to build a “deep bore” tunnel to replace the elevated highway, and to redevelop the Viaduct land for more lucrative, corporate-friendly uses.

I’ve been involved in a heated Facebook discussion/argument over the project’s merits or lack thereof. I could reiterate the many various points of view presented in this discussion (why wasn’t this done decades ago; why isn’t there more transit in it; why etc.).

Invariably, two semi-inter-related arguments arise:

• San Francisco got rid of its elevated highway, therefore Seattle MUST do likewise; and
• This town totally, forever, SUCKS if it doesn’t do exactly what I want it to do.

My responses:

• No, Seattle DOES NOT have to do everything exactly the way they did them in Egoville USA. This place is its own place, with its own needs. Get used to it.
• The infamous “Seattle process” is not about achieving consensus, I’ve concluded. It’s about delaying consensus (or the imposition of political will) for as long as possible, so all parties can fully vent their emotional feelings of righteous superiority. (“This town totally forever SUCKS, man, because it won’t do everything the way I think it should do them.”)
• The Viaduct is a relic of the era of our maritime-industrial heritage, prior to the developers’ dream of turning the waterfront into a “harbourpointe.” That’s part of what I love about it.
• However, that day’s gone and it’s not coming back. Cargo’s now in containers. That action’s on and around Harbor Island and Interbay.
• If the central waterfront and environs must be remade, let’s remake them in a friendly, funky way, not in a pompous Olympic Sculpture Park way. Bring on the tacky tourist stands, the hot dog vendors, the skateboard ramps, the buskers, the “fine art galleries” selling kitschy oil paintings of whales and herons. The last thing Seattle needs is another impracticable monument to the declaration of world-class-osity.
• I still like the Viaduct. I always will. Even when it’s gone.

…“Architecture and Resistance,” but Leebus Woods offers advice suited to all. Examples:

Resist whatever seems inevitable.Resist people who seem invincible.

Resist the embrace of those who have lost.

Resist the flattery of those who have won.

Resist any idea that contains the word algorithm.

Resist the hope that you’ll get that big job.

Resist getting big jobs.

Resist the suggestion that you can only read Derrida in French.

Resist taking the path of least resistance.

Resist the growing conviction that They are right.

Resist the nagging feeling that They will win.

(via Chuck Mathias):

So the big-wigs are getting the gazillion-dollar tunnel nobody else wants (Guys! I don’t care how temporarily cheap the depression’s made gas–cars are OVER! If you had the foresight of the average
rat sniffing a trap, you’d use the few dollars left before hyperinflation sets in to renovate the state’s railroads, including the TRACKS THAT ARE ALREADY UNDER THE VIADUCT!) Just another notch to add to their shootin’ arns, I guess, next to the monorail lots of other people wanted but didn’t get, and the baseball stadium lots of other people didn’t want, but got stuck with anyway. There are probably other examples, but I’m a Tacoman and not well-informed (sorry for the redundancy).I guess the question is: Are liberal oligarchs supposed to be better than the other kind?

Your site’s a treasure, by the way–about the only blog of a strictly local nature I never miss.

Chuck Mathias

But I’ve a less hectic day-work schedule this week, so let’s try to catch up on the recent news:

• Microsoft’s new on-campus mall includes a miniature, officially licensed “Pike Place Market” area. Like all of the MS “Commons,” it’s open only to MS employees and guests. This is wrong on more levels than I want to enumerate here, but I’ll settle for just a few concerns: Does it include the Athenian Inn? Farmer-run produce stalls? The magic shop?
• 
  Can you dig it?: It’s official. The Alaskan Way Viaduct will be replaced by a tubular hole in the ground beneath First Avenue, a hole which won’t have exits to downtown or Belltown. Bah.
• 
  Otherwise, our Democratic-controlled Legislature behaved very GOP-esque. It passed an all-cuts budget, decimated social services, and quietly shut down any talk about making our state tax system less regressive.
• 
  Sand clogs the pipes at the Magnolia sewer plant, due to all the sand put on city roads last December. Hey, let’s make a new artificial beach!
• 
  GM to dump thousands of jobs, hundreds of dealers, and the whole of Pontiac. (Oh yeah, Saturn and Hummer are gong away too; but my urban-hipster conditioning prevents me from mourning Hummer, and I’m too old to have any teenage memories of cruising the strip-mall roads in a Saturn.)
• 
  Sounders FC’s off to a smashing start; while the Mariners approach their ’01 glory days. Nice.

I’m on a marathon temp job this week and next. Until the 24th of this month, I’m basically doing little but working, commuting, sleeping, and perhaps eating. Expect few if any posts during this time.

Instead, consider a peek at writer-composer Igor Keller’s new blog, Hideous Belltown. Keller claims to have just recently noticed that a lot of Seattle’s artificially flat neighborhood “is downright hideously ugly.”

Well, it always was such, ever since Denny Hill was removed early last century and the resulting lowland became downtown’s low-rent district. It became a place of printing plants, car lots, union halls, social service agencies, warehouses, storefront taverns, and a few stoic lo-rise apartments and hotels.

Belltown was the unassuming generic cityscape in between the Space Needle and the downtown towers. It was what the Monorail helped you bypass between downtown shopping and Seattle Center entertainment. It was a relative nothing, in the middle of everything.

Which is precisely what made Belltown so attractive to artists and musicians in the 1980s and early 1990s.

It was a place of (relatively) cheap rents, funky loft spaces, dive bars, and endless possibilities.

Of course, real estate developers also saw the possibilities.

After a few starts and stops, successive mayoral administrations succeeded in pushing Belltown as a hi-rise residential mecca.

And, either in spite or because of the gentle nudges of city zoning policies, the neighborhood’s big new buildings were generally just as homely as the small old buildings they replaced.

Which, of course, is part of the area’s enduring charm. Seriously.